The Elevator Game

The Elevator Game

The Elevator Game is a Korean Urban Legend that got popular because of the Elisa Lam case. Lam was a twenty-something woman from Canada who was found drowned in the water tank on the roof of Hotel Cecil in Los Angeles. Nobody knows how she got to the roof or what she was doing there in the first place. Or how she was able to open the heavy lid to the tank to get into the water. Even weirder, she took off all of her clothes before climbing up the ladder to her demise.

There’s a ton more creeptastic weirdness to the Elisa Lam story and if you want to obsess over the case then definitely check out this video series by Brain Scratch. Just be prepared to freak out and not sleep for a few days because it will get under your skin.

The eeriest piece of evidence in the Elisa Lam case is the elevator footage below. Some have suggested that Lam was playing the Elevator Game in the Cecil Hotel and that she was summoned to her death by a paranormal force.

I don’t think that’s what happened to her. I believe that she was killed by someone staying at the Cecil Hotel and was lured to the rooftop to make it look accidental. I believe that the person got away with it and has or will kill again. I think that the police have an idea of who it was but didn’t have enough evidence to do anything about it. So, they swept it under the rug and played dumb.

I don’t think there was anything paranormal about it.

Still, that didn’t leave me any less intrigued about the origin of the Elevator Game and if it could possibly work. There’s not a lot on the internet about its inception. The rules to the game show up on this Korean website and have something to do with this comic. I tried to use Google Translate but it doesn’t work on either site. Fortunately, there are others who were able to translate it. You can check them out here and here if you are purist.

I went ahead and used the directions from Daniel Haye’s Thought Catalog post because they were very clear and concise. I did cross check them with the other translations and they check out. I took the NVus Alien team to a hotel in Ventura County to try out the game. You can watch our attempts in the videos below.

Now, in the 2nd video, we do take some liberties and mess with the rules a bit. You are only supposed to have one person in the elevator at a time but we did try it in pairs. We did do the same pattern of floors, though. Really, we were just trying to see if we could push our luck.

Some intriguing things did happen but I am not sure if the Elevator Game is anything more than a played out myth. Don’t let that stop you from trying it out, though. It has a cool creep factor to it and it might just work for you. Make sure to post about your experiences if you do, in fact, end up on the other side.